Give the man music

This blog has been silent of late due to my travels to, first, a conference in Rome, and then, a couple of weeks of R&R around Puglia.  As such, my ponderings have been banking up while I waited for decent internet access.

All this travel and stays in hotels of various quality and other accommodation has got me thinking about lost competitive opportunities for hoteliers.  The one that is really starting to aggravate is the failure to provide facilities for listening to music.

In a world were huge numbers of travellers are carrying Apple music players of various descriptions, I am stunned that it has not become de rigeur to provide an iPod dock in hotel rooms.  I would love the chance to move beyond headphones or the tinny speaker on my iPhone.

The cost to a hotelier would be low (decent units go for less than $100), and the payoff in terms of satisfaction would be high.  As travellers become more and more linked, and more vocal, through feedback sites such as Tripadvisor, hotels should be looking for simple but effective ways to make the stay more enjoyable and to differentiate themselves from others.  This would be one of them.

I can only recall one hotel that I’ve stayed in which provided a dock. It rocked and was well-named!

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Time for Apple to flex its muscles?

There’s more to a firm or product’s success than merely the action of the firm in question.

Apple have a struck rich seam of gold with the iPhone.  I recently joined said user cult, and in the Australian domestic setting, was wowed by its interface, the integration of voice and data services (plus all the apps, music and general funkiness elements).

But, here I am in Thailand and I don’t dare utilise the data roaming facilities (beyond typically unsuccessful searches for free wi-fi).  I am simply unwilling to incur the astronomical prices being quoted by my Aussie telecoms provider (something like $20 a mb!), nor am I enamoured with the call costs ($1 for 30 secs).

So I am back using a 1st generation Nokia with a local SIM card and a ridiculously cheap prepaid topup.  I also carry what is now effectively a very pricey iPhone touch in case someone calls from down under.

It is alarming how easily the utility of a nifty product can fall away.

It is criminal how the various national (and international) telecoms players interact to generate such enormous rents from international travellers.  There were similar problems in the voice domain a decade ago, but someone clearly broke the cartel.

The challenge is there for Apple given their headline device is so data hungry. It is scaring off corporate clients. There is a lot of noise around the internet from dissatisfied customers slugged with outrageous bills.

Apple has rewritten the handset provider-telecoms bargaining relationship, earning a considerably higher percentage of call revenues than their competitors.  Will they flex their muscles on the global roaming front and thus maintain their unofficial role as the purported patron saints of consumers everywhere?

Will books be the next records?

My post of last week about the exaggerated death of vinyl records (and their resurrection) has got me thinking about the challenge to the physical book from the Kindle and other similar electronic devices.

Will Kindles, and any eventual and probably much sexier Apple i-Tablet thingie, kill books?

The contrast with recorded music is a curious one. Music has had a shifting portability dimension in modern times mainly built around the “player”.

Phonographs and record players had limited mobility, while radios became more portable (but lacked storage/choice elements). As storage media changed (to 8-track cartridges and cassettes) car stereos became possible, and eventually mobile personal stereos (both boombox and Walkman styles) the norm.

With CDs we got sound-quality and durability that created an expectation that our music should be available everywhere. Digital music was thus just the next step. Of course, there was that disruptive technology stage where digital was a poor substitute and the players were clumsy, but Apple sorted that all out for us.

The pace of change in the book industry has been much slower. The basic product is not much different to that of 100 years ago. Yes, the printing technology has been transformed, but the reading experience is pretty much the same. Portability has never varied as the content and the medium have remained one and the same.

The big question then becomes whether the embodiment of the book is more overwhelming for consumers than in the music market. I can see that carrying multiple titles around in a Kindle is more practical when travelling, or as a students, but beyond that I personally am pretty wedded to carrying a single book on public transport, to a cafe etc. I like the diversity of covers, typefaces, textures, weights, sizes etc and associate them strongly with my reading experience.

If others share such emotive connections, are Kindles a real threat to publishers, printers and bookstores? Or are they just the cassette player of the noughties?

Step back in time: the vinyl fightback

As some of you might know, I am a pretty big music fan, and have invested a rather silly amount of money over the years in increasingly redundant CDs (1200+?).

I still buy the things, but most of the music I listen to ends up coming out of my iPod or via ITunes on my desktop (as uploaded from said CDs). The process of playing a CD through the stereo at home doesn’t induce much romantic nostalgia. Yes, the stereo sounds better than the tinny computer speakers and bud headphones, but feeding the iPod through is just as satisfying.

What really is fun is plonking a record on the turntable, listening for the opening crackle, and also scrutinising the sleeve artwork at its natural scale (i.e. 12″ square). That’s music (and music consumerism/fetishism) at its most sensory (beyond the live forum).

The drama with the vinyl format for too long has been the difficulty of getting the tunes off the vinyl and into the computer/iPod. Of late, I have begun to buy more and more releases on vinyl, and the big drawcard has been stickers like the one above. Many vinyl versions now come with a little card or sticker inserted in the packaging which allows a download of an MP3 version of the same album. Now, my life is easier, and I have the best of both worlds.

And I’m not alone in getting excited about this. Vinyl sales just passed 2m for 2009 in the US – a number not seen since the early days of CDs.

This is a wonderful example of a technology (and thus a sub-segment of an industry) bouncing back from what looked like obsolescence. Too often we assume that technology (and consumers) only progress forward.

It would also seem this is not just a retro fad. The growth has been pretty steady for the past few years. It may well be a niche market, comparable perhaps to boutique beers, original artwork or hardcover books.

I do like the ideas of the original Wired editor Kevin Kelly on why pricier tangible products might be preferred by some consumers rather than ubiquitous and close to free digital versions. He refers to generative value:

“…a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.”

He goes on to propose eight different generatives. The relevant ones for vinyl records would be embodiment and perhaps also patronage (i.e. you feel you should support the artist, and perhaps technology, involved). It is hard to see how digital music can address such issues.

What are the strategic management implications? Well, it seems to be smaller record labels and certain genres (dance music, garage and indie rock) that have embraced this collision of the physical and the digital. They may build a point of differentiation with fans (and bands). Presumably also those who have persisted with pressing plants, artwork services etc are now reaping the rewards of their persistence and rare capabilities.

What other industries have/will experience(d) such technological regress?